Greek betting and lottery operator OPAP started 2018 on the right foot, posting gains in revenue, earnings and profit in the first quarter.

OPAP’s official figures show gross gaming revenue of €377m in the first three months of 2018, up 5.1% from the same period last year. Earnings increased 11.1% to €87m while net profit jumped one-fifth to €40m.

OPAP CEO Damian Cope credited the earnings and profit improvements to better cost controls, a lower effective corporate tax rate and a newly renegotiated commission rate with its retail partners.

A number of OPAP agents declined to sign the new contracts, leading to the number of OPAP shops in Greece falling from 4,367 at the end of 2017 to 3,836 by the end of Q1. OPAP says it expects this number to be back up over 4,000 by the end of 2018.

Delaware has joined the list of states offering legal single-game sports betting, a club that until Tuesday consisted entirely of Nevada.

On Tuesday afternoon shortly after 1:30pm, Delaware Gov. John Carney strode up to the new sportsbook at the Dover Downs Hotel & Casino to place the state’s inaugural single-game wager, a $10 punt on the Philadelphia Phillies (he’s from Philly) to beat the Chicago Cubs on Tuesday night.

Following Carney’s ceremonial wager, Dover Downs opened up action to other patrons, and similar scenes played out at the state’s two other authorized sports betting venues, the Delaware Park racino and the Harrington Raceway & Casino. Online wagering is expected to follow the land-based bets, but there’s no timeline for that.

Oddly enough, you must be 21 years old to place a sports wager in Delaware, while the state allows adults as young as 18 to place race betting wagers. Clearly, there is nothing US governments won’t do to prop up the dying racing industry. But we digress…

Police in Thailand’s capital Bangkok have made their latest online sports betting arrests, as the government frets over the expected betting tsunami during the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

On Sunday night, Thai media reported that Bangkok police raided a three-story house in a gated community in the eastern part of the city after receiving a tip that an illegal online gambling operation was being run out of the residence. Eight men were arrested and charged with organizing, promoting or coercing individuals to gamble.

The accused reportedly operated a network of football betting websites, all of them branded with some variation of FIFA’s name. The ring had reportedly been in operation for eight months, during which it handled monthly wagers of around THB15m (US$470k).

The ring reportedly had amassed over 900 monthly users and were adding more than 50 new users per day in recent weeks, according to Police Maj. Gen. Phanurat Lungboon. These registered bettors will be called in for questioning and could face their own charges if police don’t like their answers.

North Korea wants America to help it build an integrated resort casino in exchange for concessions on its nuclear program, according to South Korean media reports.

On Tuesday, South Korea’s Donga Ilbo media outlet reported that Kim Yong Choi, a top aide to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, had suggested the US help finance a plan for a casino in a proposed international tourist destination in the Wonsan-Kalma coastal region.

The proposal comes as the two countries are trying to establish a framework for discussion of North Korea’s nuclear plans at the June 12 summit in Singapore. Kim Yong Choi visited the White House on Monday, during which he reportedly floated the casino investment idea.

Kim Jong-un first proposed the tourist-friendly zone in his New Year’s address to residents of the Hermit Kingdom and was filmed touring the construction operations last month. The plan is for the tourist zone to finish construction by April 15, 2019, the birthday of Kim’s grandfather Kim Il Sung.

The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) will follow in the footsteps of South and Western Australia by slapping gambling operators with a 15 percent point-of-consumption tax (POCT) next year.

According to The Canberra Times, ACT is set to implement a new tax regime on all bets made on its territory in January 2019 in order to top up state coffers. The ACT government expects to rake in AUD2 million (US$1.52 million) annually from the tax measure.

“The introduction of this tax will bring the ACT into line with multiple other Australian jurisdictions which are also in the process of implementing point of consumption tax arrangements,” budget papers read, according to the news outlet.

South Australia was the first state to publicly call for the imposition of a POCT back in 2015, when state Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis declared that it was “important that online gambling operators pay taxes considering that they are generating profits based on betting activities of South Australians.”

A subsidiary of Japanese gaming conglomerate Universal Entertainment Corp. has asked the Philippine Department of Justice (DOJ) to punish the prosecutor who leaked the twin rulings on the $10 million perjury and fraud cases of billionaire Kazuo Okada.

Tiger Resorts Leisure & Entertainment Inc. (TRLEI) also appealed to Philippine Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra on Monday to take over the leakage probe from Parañaque City Prosecutor Amerhassan Paudac, according to a Manila Standard report.

Paudac had already called for an investigation on the incident last week but TRLEI feared that a self-serving probe would only result in a whitewash. TRLEI described the Paudac-led probe as “improper, self-serving and unjustified.”

“It is the DOJ, not the panel formed by Paudac that should properly investigate the leakage of resolutions that happened at the Paranaque prosecutor’s office,” TRLEI said, according to the news outlet.

A U.S. federal appeals court has affirmed the federal government’s power to collect taxes from Florida tribal casinos, including those who benefited from casino disbursements.

The Court of Appeals made this declaration in upholding the decision of U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga to compel defendant Sally Jim to pay taxes on $272,000 in disbursements she received from the Miccosukee Tribe in 2001.

According to Daily Business Review, the three-judge Eleventh Circuit panel also agreed that the Miccosukee Tribe, which runs Miccosukee Indian Bingo and Gaming, may likewise be held liable for failing to withhold and report gaming receipts and disbursements.

Eleventh Circuit Judge Gerald Tjoflat made it clear that “when an Indian tribe decides to distribute the revenue from gaming activities … the distributions are subject to federal taxes.”

A bill seeking to prevent casino financial fraud in the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands has been introduced into the Senate.

The Marianas Variety reported that Senate President Arnold Palacios recently filed Senate Bill 20-98 to protect Saipan’s exclusive casino, Imperial Pacific Hotel & Resort, from fraudulent misuse of financial instruments.

SB 20-98, which is also known as the Prevention of Fraudulent Misuse of Financial Instruments in Casino Gaming and Other Transactions Act, will specifically address the issues on counterfeit money, fake credit cards and other financial transactions.

With America’s long history of dealing with financial fraud, Palacios believes it is only prudent for Saipan to prepare against organized crime groups that may conduct fraudulent activities in its casinos.

GentingCasino.com & GentingBet.com customers join the action with attractive tournament offers and 2018 free £10 bets.

Genting Casinos has launched its summer campaign and unsurprisingly it has a Russian flavour to celebrate the events at this year’s World Cup.

Genting has over 35 premium retail casinos in cities across the UK and in the run up to the World Cup, Genting Casino members can swipe in using their Membership Card that enters them automatically into a prize draw to win a share of a £25,000 prize pool with one winner claiming the £15,000 first prize.

In addition, Genting Casinos will be giving away 2018 free £10 bets to be used by new and existing retail customers when they bet on their mobile, via the Genting Apps and online at Genting Casino or Genting Bet.

Caesars having just reached a labor deal with the Culinary Workers Union (CWU), it’s a good time to talk about labor unions and how irrelevant they have become. Unions have been a dying breed since the 1950’s, when the percentage of unionized labor in the United States reached a high of 35%. We’re now at around 10.7%. Most union workers get their salaries from taxpayers. 34.4% of unionized workers are government bureaucrats.

Only 6.5% of the private economy is unionized, and it’s only that high because unions are protected by the federal government. They are actually allowed to commit violence against employers on a federal level, like when they strike and threaten or engage in violence against scabs and strike breakers, damage or destroy the employer’s property or even, in some cases, actually, literally, kill people. The 1973 Supreme Court decision U.S. v Enmons established that union violence against employers, including homicide, is not punishable by federal law if committed for the sake of wages or benefits. It’s still punishable by state law, but not all states actually go after instigators because it is politically unpopular. The Freedom from Union Violence Act proposed in 2007 to criminalize union violence on a federal level failed to pass. It would have prohibited obstruction of commerce, in other words picketing. Unions did not like that idea and lobbied successfully against it.

One of the last great bastions of unionized labor in the private sector in the US is on the Las Vegas Strip. “Great bastion” though is a misnomer, because while the Culinary Workers Union is the largest private sector union in the country in a Right to Work state with 60,000 members, it doesn’t have much that much power anymore.

The strike that the CWU is threatening the strip with is largely irrelevant. It will cause minor disruptions at worst if it happens, but that’s about it. No union, at least no private sector union, has the power to raise wages above market rates. They pretend that they can because that’s their whole selling point, but just like they can’t break the laws of physics, they can’t break the laws of economics either. If their demands are too high, they will lose whatever power they have left. They’re pinned down by supply and demand just like everyone else in the private economy is.